The amateur artist then wrote out the whole of the religious text on A4 paper – using hundreds of parker pens and sketching out more than 5,000 colourful illustrations.

According to the paper, he made the illustration using watercolors, crayons and collages.

The influences from Dino’s drawings range from Picasso to Matisse, from Cezanne to del Castagno – with a little bit of each hidden in his pictures.

One larger image has a line from Revelation 2:7 alongside a picture of Holocaust victim Anne Frank. Another is inspired by William Blake.

Mr Mazzoli has now finished his masterpiece and even won praise from the Pope after his son sent details of the work to Rome.

He finished the 1,473- page project last year and has been trying to get permission to publish the Christian Community Bible translation.

That permission was finally granted and Mazzoli began selling the hand-lettered Bible on iTunes in early May. It’s a 1.36 GB file and sells for US$14.99.

Mazzolli says all the money from sales will go to charity. He told the Catholic Herald that the proceeds were earmarked for the Claretians, a religious group that translated the Christian Community Bible.

According to the Dino Mazzoli site, he was born and raised in Italy and began painting as a young man. He moved to the UK in 1961 and took a 20-year break from art before he began painting again at the suggestion of artist Dorothy Swain Lewis. He’s had showings at galleries in Heathfield, Brighton and London.